Elucidations

  ‘If it were true it would be cosmic child abuse’ I’ve heard in and outside Christian circles in response to the understanding of God’s love shown in the Cross. The idea of God willing his Son to suffer and die to make things right in the world raises more questions for some people than living agnostic with the wrongs. That there is no official doctrine of atonement - how God and humanity are made one in Christ - makes for another complication. So does the simplification of thinking on the Cross to throw a line to Christian seekers not to mention poetic licence employed in hymns about the passion of Christ. Evangelical songwriter Stuart Townend weathered criticism for these lines in his hymn In Christ Alone: ‘on that cross, as Jesus died, the wrath of God was satisfied’. At the other side of the Christian spectrum this phrase in a Roman Catholic prayer has detractors: ‘Look, we pray, upon the oblation of your Church and… the sacrificial Victim by whose death you willed to reconcil...

  ‘I prayed with my heart, everything around me seemed delightful and marvellous. The trees, the grass, the birds, the earth, the air, the light seemed to be telling me that they existed for man’s sake, that they witnessed to the love of God for man, that everything proved the love of God for man, that all things prayed to God and sang his praise.’ This description of prayer captures the sense of God in all things central to Christianity. It comes from the Russian classic ‘Way of a Pilgrim’ which encourages repeating the Jesus Prayer ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner’ as aid to praying without ceasing and feeling one with nature. Given the enormity of the environmental crisis I find this sense of creation praising God in tension with its ‘groaning in labour pains’ awaiting ‘be[ing] set free from its bondage to decay [to] obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God’ (Romans 8:21-22). Both passages, ‘Way of a Pilgrim’ and Romans, imply a link betwee...